pithecophobia
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
27
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The denial of or a discomfort with the scientific notion that humans evolved from apes.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Nevertheless I beg your indulgence for describing a new kind of phobia which is now widely prevalent among the American public. It may be named pithecophobia, or the dread of apes—especially the dread of apes as relatives or ancestors. During the past few years this phobia has become almost pandemic; perhaps we have not yet passed the peak of its incidence, especially in rural communities."
- "Accordingly this little book can hardly expect much popularity either in Tennessee, where the very idea of evolution is anathema, or in the metropolitan strongholds where pithecophobia is still prevalent and man’s complete superiority to the all too man-like apes is somewhat nervously stressed."
- "Eliade […] possibly struggled to find a balance between his fascination with antidarwinian evolutionary biology and the outright rejection of evolution for all things human, which ultimately led to his quasi-theological view of an orthogenetic, teleological evolutionary path. As a result, he developed what can be called a sort of peculiar pithecophobia[…]."
- "Anthropocentric pithecophobia has been hypothesized as an influence on late twentieth-century primate classification. Morris Goodman attributed the tendency of anthropologists to continue classifying humans and great apes into the separate families Hominidae and Pongidae […] to an anthropocentric bias."